AH, yes! What of Ralph? Through all these months, to Marion so weary with suspense and ever-recurring disappointment, what had he been about? How came it that he, whom we have heard vowing to himself that her happiness should be his first consideration, had allowed her thus to suffer, when, as we know, a word from him at any moment would have set all right, would have made the world rosy again, and filled with sunlight even the grim old house at Mallingford? To explain it all, to show what a strange chain of commonplace mistakes and cross-purposes had, coupled with one small act of deliberate malice, effected all the mischief, tortured with doubt and misgiving two true hearts, and altogether changed the course of two, if not three, lives—to make all this clear, we must step back some way: to the very time, indeed, we last heard of Ralph. Heard of him, only, incidentally, as having been successful in obtaining the promise of Sir Archibald, or rather, through his influence, that of the powers that be in such matters, with respect to the expected consular vacancy at A—. That was the last, I think, that we know of him thus far, excepting, by-the-by, an instant’s peep of him more recently in his mother’s Swiss maison de campaigne, where the Severns were domesticated for the summer. To return, however, to the day in March, on which, hopeful and elated, as I think I said, Ralph set out again for Altes, having succeeded in the mission which had brought him across the water. The journey back was a much more cheerful affair than had been that to England. Ralph was not naturally by any means given to over-anxiety about money matters—in fact his actual experience of limited means had been but small, for he had always had enough for moderate requirements. But he was a thoroughly conscientious man. Many would say morbidly so, and I daresay there might be nothing exaggerated or unreasonable in such an opinion. Very quiet and reserved people are apt to become morbid on some point. They get hold of a notion, and turn it round and round in their minds, till a sort of mental dizziness, very adverse to clear judgement, results. It is a grand thing now and then to get a fresh, outside opinion on matters about which we are deeply interested. Nor is the soundness of that opinion of as much moment as might be imagined. Its freshness is the great thing; for assuredly, though directly it may not influence our eventual decision, our own powers of judgement will, by its breezy rush through our cobwebbed brain, become marvellously invigorated, and braced for the work, which, after all, to be well done, must be their own, and no one else’s!